PlayStation 4 Not Backwards Compatible With Retail or Digital Games

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A new console brings a new, dedicated ecosystem.

By Colin Moriarty

In a roundtable conversation with journalists, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios noted that PS3 games of both the retail and downloadable variety will not be compatible with PlayStation 4, at least not natively. In other words, your PS3 discs won’t work in the new console nor will the games you downloaded. This means that hits like Journey, The Unfinished Swan, Shatter and hundreds of other games available in the digital space will not be carried over to PlayStation 4 in addition to the collection of PS3 discs sitting on your shelf.

Exit Theatre Mode

There’s a catch, though: emulation. The PlayStation 3 doesn’t read PlayStation 2 discs (at least not anymore), but it can play PS2 games via the PlayStation Store in an emulated environment. Yoshida concedes that this is possible for PlayStation 4 supporting legacy PlayStation consoles as well. Indeed, the Gaikai presentation during PlayStation 4’s reveal touched on this “everything, everywhere” mentality. But for now, downloaded PS3 games won’t work “unless, somehow, some games work on emulation. And the easiest thing, technically, would be to make PSone games work on PS4 with emulation. But we’re not talking about our emulation plans as yet.”

In short, “There are two ways [to play legacy content]: emulation or cloud services [from Gaikai]. But native support [of digital games from PS3], no, sorry. It doesn’t work.”

But how about some good news to close? Yoshida reaffirmed that “disc-based games on PS4” will work on any other PlayStation 4. So, as first reported yesterday, PS4 will have no used games/shared games lock for retail, store-bought titles.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.